Submission Regarding National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026

Dear Senate Standing Committees on Community Affairs & Secretariat,

Thank you for the opportunity to provide a submission to the inquiry regarding the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026.

While I acknowledge the need to ensure the long-term financial sustainability of the NDIS, I hold significant concerns regarding how the proposed legislative changes will practically impact participants. My submission focuses on the shift towards functional capacity assessments, the concerning erosion of the “reasonable and necessary” framework in favour of prescriptive support lists, and the severe risks these dictated lists pose when combined with protracted, flawed plan review processes.

I strongly welcome the Bill’s shift away from a diagnosis-based model toward a framework that assesses a person’s substantially reduced functional capacity. The reliance on rigid access lists has historically favoured individuals who have the means to obtain a specific medical diagnosis, while unfairly excluding those whose conditions are complex, rare, or lack a neat diagnostic label in addition to the accessibility and financial standing to obtain such.

Basing eligibility on a transparent assessment of how a person’s day-to-day living is practically impacted by their disability is a positive step. This ensures the NDIA does not fail to include individuals whose profound disabilities are not acknowledged by a conventional medical label or still undergoing diagnostic pathways, allowing the scheme to better capture the genuine diversity of impairment.

However, my primary concern is that the Bill fundamentally undermines the concept of “reasonable and necessary” supports. The legislation seeks to tighten the definition of these supports and introduces broad new powers for the Minister to make determinations that cap, restrict, or reduce funding for specified groups of supports across the scheme.

By empowering the Minister to set maximum funding amounts, support intensities, or percentage reductions for entire categories of supports without considering individual circumstances, the government is effectively removing “reasonable and necessary” as the core mechanism for assessing how funding should be appropriately spent. Instead, The Bill paves the way for a dictated, categorical list of allowable supports.

While the Bill correctly removes rigid labels from the access gateway, it pervasively applies rigid labels to the accessibility of funding once a person is inside the scheme.

This does not fix the core issues within the NDIS; it merely shifts the barrier from entering the scheme to accessing the right supports within it.

If a dictated list of supports is rigidly applied to a participant’s plan, it entirely removes their ability to flexibly adapt to life’s inevitable changes. The moment a life situation changes, a participant will be forced to undergo an unscheduled plan reassessment just to access the supports they urgently need. The Bill’s proposed mechanisms make this process deeply flawed and dangerous for participants in several ways:

1. Unacceptable Statutory Delays and Wait Times: Currently, participants already face agonising wait times for plan reviews, often sitting at 6-8 months in practice. Rather than fixing this, the Bill legally extends the NDIA’s timeframe to respond to a participant’s request for a plan reassessment from 21 days to 90 days. Furthermore, the Bill removes “deemed refusal” protections, meaning that if the NDIA simply ignores a request for 90 days, the participant has no legal right to appeal the lack of action to the Administrative Review Tribunal.

2. Reliance on Unqualified Assessors: A review is only successful if the person assessing the plan is skilled enough to recognise how a participant’s needs have changed. Evidence shows that NDIA planners and assessors are not required to hold allied health qualifications. Providers and families have described the planning process as a “lottery,” where outcomes depend entirely on whether an assessor actually understands complex medical evidence. It is deeply concerning that participants have had funding requests declined because unqualified staƯ fail to comprehend the clinical evidence provided to them.

3. The Financial Burden of Proof: To trigger a review under the new, tighter conditions, participants must prove a “significant and ongoing” change in their functional capacity or circumstances. This requires extensive new reports from GPs and specialists, adding thousands of dollars in both out-of-pocket costs and to the plan funds where that report is required/requested, adding significant administrative burden to families who are already stretched to their limits, which may not even be accepted or used during a plan review. If a review is refused or deprecated, this not only fails to support a person in the way they need, but the report gathering has also reduced the funding accessible to them, which leaves them at significant risk of being left without supports.

The inability to flexibly access supports without enduring a months-long, costly review process will have devastating consequences for specific cohorts. It is particularly dangerous for young adults transitioning through significant life stages, such as leaving school, entering higher education, or starting employment, where support needs evolve rapidly. For example, young participants have already faced situations where rigid funding structures prevented them from accessing critical support to safely transition to high school, resulting in regression.

Plus, anyone who experiences a sudden and unexpected change in their life, such as the sudden illness of a primary carer, a change in living arrangements, or a temporary medical crisis, will be left stranded. Disability is not static and stripping the scheme of its flexibility forces vulnerable people to wait in administrative limbo during their most critical times of need.

Recommendations

I urge the Committee to:

1. Support the transition to functional capacity assessments for scheme access, signing the tools developed to measure this capacity are co-designed with the disability community to capture invisible, dynamic, and complex conditions.

2. Protect the individualised “reasonable and necessary” framework, ensuring that funding accessibility remains tailored to the specific needs of the participant, rather than being restricted by dictated, inflexible lists.

3. Reject the extension of the NDIA’s decision timeframes to 90 days and reinstate the “deemed refusal” protections to ensure participants have timely access to reviews and appeal rights.

4. Ensure that plan reviews are conducted by qualified allied health professionals who have the expertise to properly evaluate complex medical evidence, reducing the financial burden on participants to constantly re-prove their needs.

Thank you for considering my submission. I urge the Committee to ensure that the pursuit of sustainability does not come at the cost of the individualised care, flexibility, and timely support that makes the NDIS so vital to those who need such supports.